Played just a little last night. If you're a fan of Battleheart and played as much of that game as I did, this one's kind of a no-brainer at $0.99. It takes a slightly different approach but the general gameplay feels largely the same. In some ways it's a step backward, in others it's simply different.

Each battle is just a single boss fight, there's no warm up. The goal is/was to simulate a mini-WoW-like raid on a boss with every fight. Which means to some extent there are likely puzzle/trick elements to beating each boss. You've only got 3 guys (warrior, priest, archer) and there's no variation there, which is kind of a bummer. Seems like a mage of some sort would have made more sense, but anyway. Each guy can bring 2 skills with him to the fight, so this is where the strategic portion comes into play. Each battle you win (and you can repeat battles) you get a fixed amount of cash and that's it. No xp, no loot, nada. The cash is used to buy new skills or upgrade old ones. It's a pretty simplistic system and could definitely stand to get a little deeper. At bare minimum you'd think a "raid" simulating game would want to deliver in the LOOT department, but oh well.

The actual battles play out similar to Battleheart, tough and drag to move and attack, touch healer and drag to who you want him to heal. Skills are on timers, used at your discretion. There are also "distractions" - for instance the ice boss will use his own skill to freeze one of your guys into a block of ice on occasion, at which point you need to react by tapping on it vigorously. It's a nice addition to the basic combat and gets you a little more physically involved.

I'll probably follow up with more if the game continues to interest me, we'll see!

I played it, and my opinion stands. there is nothing here that wasn't already done better in the previous two games.

I played some more, and disagree.... at bare minimum the graphic style is different and as much as I loved Battleheart (BH), I like this 2.5D style as well.

The game is also on the one hand more simple (no gear, no xp/levels, no additional classes, 1 less character), but also much more difficult, and requires more strategic thought (which skills to bring) and, for either better or worse, more grinding to upgrade skills. One subtlety to keep in mind is that whatever skill you bring also adds a passive bonus or 2, so that can be an important factor later on. I did some grinding in BH as well, but that was mainly to level a particular character or 2. BH had a lot more throw away levels and relatively fewer bosses with special abilities. Raid Leader every battle (except Arena) has been a "boss" and has had a different/unique aspect to it. Also the one Arena was a very different experience.... your guys are bombarded by poison and slugs, so you have to move them around to keep them alive while tapping on slugs to kill them and gold to get more gold. It's much more hectic and challenging in a different sort of way. I end up just focusing on keeping one person alive as long as possible; I'm thinking with better healer upgrades I could last a lot longer.

If you were only going to choose between the two games, I'd whole-heartedly recommend Battleheart, but if you loved BH gameplay and played it to death, I'd say this one (particularly at $0.99) still offers a fun alternative to this growing genre.

I finally picked up Heroes vs Monsters, I don't know how I possibly could have missed it given how much I love Battleheart. This game is a serious ripoff of BH, I mean pretty much everything including the art style is ripped off. It's almost unbelievable. I guess they made the character's faces more of a frown and their bodies are discombobulated. Gear changes their appearance so that's something cool that BH didn't have IIRC. It also does offer a little more in terms of stats and I like that the world map isn't fixed dots. Also recruitment of new heroes is earned through beating them, which is cool. Oddly though 2 of the ones I beat are repeat classes which doesn't seem particularly useful. The gold prices for gear is a little outrageous, clearly they want to encourage you to buy in app gold, but this is one type of game where I don't want any shortcuts. The "grind" is an enjoyable part of the game for me.

Speaking of which, this is an oddity in Raid Leader. The game is only $0.99. For an additional $0.99 you can get something like 10,000 gold, which seems like it would be more than enough to unlock and upgrade almost all the skills. Kind of a bummer if you ask me. I refused to do it though as again it seems like it upsets what should be part of the game, grinding for cash and earning every skill upgrade.

I kind of wish someone would blend the games together, taking the best parts of each game to make a stellar sequel. I prefer the 3D-ish art style in Raid Leader as well as the items upgrading appearance from HvM. I like the "live" map in HvM as well as the upgrade tree, though I'd like to see even more of that. Also would like more interesting randomized loot. Mob-wise, the bosses in Raid Leader seem to be a lot better thought out in terms of challenge and special abilities. I think overall I still prefer an xp/level system over what RL did, the only problem being it leaves the door open to just outleveling a boss to beat it instead of doing something strategically or through skill.